NBA’s Tech EVP Presents Long-Term Vision For Wearables

Kevin Love of the Cleveland Cavaliers and Timofey Mozgov of the Brooklyn Nets battle for the ball. (Photo by Al Bello/Getty Images)

As the NBA and National Basketball Players Association work to find common ground related to whether players can use wearables during games and what the league can do with the data collected from them, an NBA tech executive is envisioning how those devices might be used further into the future.

The long-term goal is to use tracking devices to detect player motion, which when combined with optical tracking technologies the NBA has used for the past seven years, will help computers better understand the game of basketball and improve the game overall for teams, players and fans, said Steve Hellmuth, executive vice president of media operation and technology for the NBA.

“We’ll always do optical tracking because it will lead us, it’s on a road map, to motion capture, which is really more of an endgame than wearables,” Hellmuth told Bram Weinstein on the SportTechie podcast.

This is the first season that the league has been fully functional in its partnership with Second Spectrum to boost its player-tracking capabilities. Wearables are already worn by the majority of teams during practice, which record things such as biometrics and motion to infer things about an athlete’s health, sleep patterns, diet, workouts, performance and overall well being.

Most teams have some variation of a software dashboard that compiles and processes the data. However, Hellmuth said the league’s tracking capabilities are “more accurate and better than ever” now with Second Spectrum.

If the NBA and the player’s association can come to an agreement on wearable use during games, then the NBA would cross-reference motion data with optical tracking data to know with “absolute certainty” where the player and ball are on the court, according to Hellmuth.

“Once we have motion capture, then we actually know the hands, arms, legs, feet positioning,” he said. It’s “kind of the last piece in really allowing a computer to understand the game of basketball.”

Virtual and augmented reality are two other technologies that the NBA is eyeing.

For augmented reality, the league this season launched a new app that will start with allowing people to shoot virtual balls at virtual hoops from their smartphones, with the baskets appearing in the everyday world sort of how Pokemons appeared around the world during last summer’s Pokemon Go craze. Over time, Hellmuth said fans might be able to engage in contests related to augmented reality games.

But the really appealing part of augmented reality as far as the NBA is concerned is overlaying over-the-top streams with player-tracking data to give fans watching from home an added layer of complexity, something Hellmuth says the NBA is currently “working experimentally” with Second Spectrum to accomplish.

“With live television, your AR ability is limited because of the nature of live,” he said. “But with OTT streams being delayed in the encoding process, there’s things that you can do related to the player tracking data and the statistics to augment what is seen.”

As for virtual reality, Hellmuth says the technology is “still early stages,” though the NBA is working on providing experiences to fans who might not be able to travel to the U.S. to watch a game in person or afford courtside seats to be able to watch the action up close.

“This is the next best experience that we can provide them with,” he said. “You’re under the basket, you’re seeing the collisions, you’re seeing the athleticism, the grace of the players that you just can’t when watching a flat television screen.”

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About Jen Booton

Jen is a senior writer at SportTechie covering the many ways technology is disrupting sports. On any given day she may cover a wide variety of stories ranging from the newest virtual reality training tools for the NFL, the rise of eSports leagues and the infiltration of drones in extreme sports. Prior to joining SportTechie, Jen was a technology reporter at MarketWatch, where she covered major Silicon Valley companies, such as Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook.
Jen is a licensed skydiver who jumps out of planes, helicopters and hot air balloons for fun in her spare time. She’s a former NCAA cross country athlete and currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.
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